So I’d like to put a general theme of discussion here on SM to a concrete test: Live 8, naughty or nice?

I don’t work in Africa, but I do work in a HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Country), Bolivia. And many Savage Minds readers and participants obviously work on and think about issues of global inequality & the forms of mutual, ahem, recognition made possible and impossible by global inequality.

Over the weekend I watched a bit of TV coverage from the show in London (a city that has had quite a week…), and wasn’t at all sure how to feel about it. Or, to be more transparently honest, it’s the kind of thing for which I am a complete sucker but know I oughtn’t be.

Given the indubitably necessary and yet insufferably snarky anthropological literature of the past two decades, I know how to take Live 8 apart in a critical spirit. The trope of hapless Africa rescued by salvific Euroamerica. The unwarranted catharsis provided to a privileged audience by the spectacle itself. The cover given to the nasty machinations of the Man, recently manifested by G-8 leaders pretending their association exists only to help poor people and to watch out for the environment. Etc. etc.

On the other hand… well, I don’t guess I have to outline the “pro” side of the equation for anyone. Everyone involved vociferously and repeatedly made the case for the worthiness of the undertaking.

There are, of course, multiple other possibilities. One that comes to mind is that the whole thing was the last hurrah of anglophone imperialism, soon to be displaced by some combo of China/India/Brazil, so that Live 8 was a spectacle of another kind, ironically headlined by an (ex-colonial) Irishman, showily insisting upon the mighty benevolent potential of (mostly) England-and-the-United States just as they begin to slide under the domestic burden of their foreign adventures and have only to look forward to days ahead when they’ll be wanting a little external debt forgiveness of their own.

Who is to say. But to return to the point, I’ll state my position on Live 8: naughty AND nice. Does this make me a fatuous booby? Don’t hold back.